Betty Boop collapses on Broadway near 49th Street as handlers work to raise the deflated helium balloon during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York. (AP Photo/Ron Frehm, File)
Betty Boop and Blondie are joining Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh in the public domain.
The first appearances of the classic cartoon and comic characters are among the pieces of intellectual property whose 95-year United States copyright maximum had been reached, putting them in the public domain on Jan 1. That means creators can use and repurpose them without permission or payment.
The 2026 batch of newly public artistic creations doesn’t quite have the sparkle of the recent first entries into the public domain of Mickey or Winnie. But ever since 2019 – the end of a 20-year intellectual property drought brought on by congressional copyright extensions – every annual crop has been a bounty for advocates of more work belonging to the public.
“It’s a big year,” said Jennifer Jenkins, law professor and director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain in North Carolina, for whom New Year’s Day is celebrated as Public Domain Day.
“It’s just the sheer familiarity of all this culture.”
Jenkins said that, collectively, this year’s work shows “the fragility that was between the two wars and the depths of the Great Depression”.
Here’s a look at what has entered the public domain, based on the research of Jenkins and her centre.
Comics and characters
Betty Boop began as a dog. Seriously.
When she first appears in the 1930 short Dizzy Dishes, one of four of her cartoons entering the public domain, she’s already totally recognisable as the Jazz Age flapper later memorialised in countless tattoos, T-shirts and bumper stickers.
Mae Questel, who provided the loopy, child-like voice of cartoon characters Betty Boop and Olive Oyl, poses in this 1978 file photo with a poster of Betty Boop. — AP
She has her baby face, short hair with groomed curls, flashy eyelashes and miniature mouth. But she’s also got dangling poodle ears and a tiny black nose. Those would soon morph into dangling earrings and a tiny white nose.
She started as essentially the Minnie Mouse to a popular anthropomorphic dog named Bimbo, whom she would eventually outshine – and push aside.
She’s got a supporting role in Dizzy Dishes, performing a slinky song-and-dance in a tiny black dress. She’s not named, but sings “boop boop, a doop”.
Jenkins suggests this canine Betty Boop could be rich for exploitation in new works, and has a free idea: “She was bitten by a radioactive dog, that’s why she had this weird backstory,” she said with a laugh. “This movie needs to be made.”
The character was designed and owned by Fleischer Studios, and the shorts were released by Paramount Pictures. She was based at least in part on singer Helen Kane, known as the “Boop-Oop-a-Doop Girl”, thanks to a hit 1929 song.
Kane would lose a lawsuit over Betty Boop’s character and use of the phrase. During the proceedings the defense alleged Black singer Esther Lee Jones used similar phrases first.
Dean Young, writer of the 'Blondie' comic strip, draws in his studio in Clearwater, Florida in 2005.
Artists are now free to use this earliest Boop in films and similar work. But making merchandise won’t be free. A character’s trademark is distinct from the copyright of works that feature them. The Fleischer Productions’ trademark of Betty Boop remains intact.
Boops and doops were apparently in the air in 1930. Blondie Boopadoop was, like Betty, a young flapper, and the central character of Chic Young’s newspaper comic strip that debuted in 1930.
It inspired a film series and radio show, and is still running today in papers that still have comics.
The strip followed her carefree self breeze through life with her boyfriend, Dagwood Bumstead. The two would marry (and she would change her name) in 1933, and the strip would become the sandwich-heavy domestic comedy familiar to later readers.
Blondie and Dagwood’s famously comic courtship is now in the public domain. — Photos: Handout
Though the strip was meant to be based on a woman’s life, Dagwood would in many ways become its breakout star – a proto-Adam Driver, if you will, as the breakout actor from Girls.
Nine new Mickey Mouse cartoons also are becoming public domain. He’s joined this year by his dog Pluto, who, in 1930, was known as Rover. (He would get his long-term moniker the following year.)
Books and sleuths
The books entering the public domain this year open the door to three iconic detectives from the 20th century.
One is teen sleuth Nancy Drew, whose first four books came in 1930, starting with The Secret Of The Old Clock. They were written by Mildred Benson under the pen name Carolyn Keene.
The Nancy Drew title The Secret Of The Old Clock has been added to public domain.
Then there is the middle-aged sleuth Sam Spade, who debuted via the full-book version of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. (It had been serialised in a magazine the previous year.)
Finally, the elderly sleuth Miss Marple, who solves her first mystery in Agatha Christie’s Murder At The Vicarage.
A year after his The Sound And The Fury became public, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying becomes public domain. It would help lead to his Nobel Prize in literature.
And kiddie lit legends Dick and Jane, who taught generations to read and became essential parody fodder for decades, become public via the “Elson Basic Readers” textbooks.
Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying also becomes public domain.
Movies and tunes
A year after their film debut, The Cocoanuts, entered the public domain, the Marx Brothers’ beloved Animal Crackers joins it, as they entered their prime of high cinematic antics. The film finds Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo invading a Long Island society party celebrating an explorer of Africa.
Other movies entering the public domain include:
The Blue Angel, the German film from Josef von Sternberg that emblazoned Marlene Dietrich’s top-hatted image into film lore.
King Of Jazz, featuring the first screen appearance of Bing Crosby.
A pair of Oscar best picture winners, All Quiet On The Western Front (won in 1930), and Cimar-ron (1931). The award was known as “Outstanding Production” then, and the Academy Awards eligibility period didn’t sync with the calendar year.
The coming decade will bring a true bounty of Hollywood Golden Age films into the public domain.
Next year will be a truly monster year, literally, with the original 1931 Universal Pictures versions of Dracula and Frankenstein among the titles due.
As in the last several years, a whistle-worthy stream of tunes from the Great American Songbook will become public.
Four cherished classics written by George Gershwin, with lyrics by his brother Ira, are also on the list this year. – Handout
These include four cherished classics written by George Gershwin, with lyrics by his brother Ira: Embraceable You, I’ve Got A Crush On You, But Not for Me, and I Got Rhythm.
There’s also Georgia On My Mind, written by Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell; and Dream A Little Dream Of Me, written by Gus Kahn, Fabian Andre and Wilbur Schwandt.
Different laws regulate the actual recordings of songs, and those newly in the public domain date to 1925. They include Rodgers and Hart’s Manhattan by the Knickerbockers, Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen by Marian Anderson and The St Louis Blues by Bessie Smith, featuring Louis Armstrong. – AP
